This idea of coming out is one of the many gifts the LGBTQ community has brought to the world.

Up until now, a person announces, you have thought of me in one way.

But I have come to understand myself as something different, and I want to let you know. Whether we stay Christian

or seek to leave Christianity in a constructive way, we need to have our own kind of coming out.

I've had to do this kind of coming out in my own way as a parent to my adult kids.

As I mentioned earlier, I've had to tell them I no longer believe some of the things I believed when they were young.

In particular, I've told them that I regret the authoritarian style of parenting that I learned from the Christian community I was part of,

that I regret raising them even adjacent to a religious context where there was too much shame. I did my best as your dad, I told them,

but you deserved better. Whether or not we stay Christian, we need to do something similar.

First, if we've gone through a kind of deconstruction and reconstruction, we need to come out to our congregations, denominations,

and other Christian associates. I'm not saying we need to come out from them as if we are too good

for them. I'm not saying we need to separate ourselves from others as

superior and elite. Instead, I'm saying that we need to very lovingly, non-defensively and

non-aggressively be clear about where we are. If others reject us or prefer that we leave,

so be it. In the long run, we will find it better to be rejected for who we are

than accepted for who we aren't. Whether we have shifted out of Christianity entirely or into a new

kind of Christianity, we have to be courageous enough to come out of our closets and go public,

not minimizing the change, not feeling embarrassed about who we are becoming, not hiding our

light under a bushel of polite ambiguity.

Welcome back, everybody, to learning how to see. In this season, we're talking about learning how to

see our own Christian faith, if that's our faith tradition, to see it in a new light, to see it in a

fresh way. And in this episode, we're talking about renouncing and announcing. And something

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